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Saving salamanders in Ontario's cottage country

An East York woman is painstakingly collecting salamander eggs and hatching them, away from the local roads where she finds them and fears they'd be crushed by vehicles.

Carolyn Forbes is on a mission to rescue salamander eggs she spotted in ditches and dips in local roads near her family's Highlands cottage — right in the path of ATV racers. She has collected about 350 egg sacks and is raising them in kiddie pools at the cottage near Bancroft, Ont. (Fred Thornhill for the Toronto Star)

Carolyn Forbes, who is trying to save salamander eggs she finds in ditches near her Bancroft-area cottage, says she tries not to get too attached to the salamanders as many of them won't make it, but Lucy, seen here, is her favourite. (Fred Thornhill for the Toronto Star)

Ontario’s Ministry of Natural Resources does not allow amphibians to be taken from or released into the wild, and Carolyn Forbes, who is trying to rescue salamander eggs she finds in ditches near her cottage says she's aware of the laws "but my conscience says it's worse to let them die." Forbes is using a series of kiddie pools to raise the salamander eggs until they're ready to be released. (Fred Thornhill for the Toronto Star)

An East York woman is saving the salamanders of cottage country, rescuing them from local trails and raising them in her backyard.

Carolyn Forbes, 28, says she has collected about 350 yellow and blue-spotted salamander egg sacs, each with the possibility of hatching between 20 and 50 babies, from ditches and dips in local roads near her Highlands cottage near Bancroft.

Since April, she has been taking the eggs away from the middle of trails — where ATV riders race — to her backyard where she’s built her own salamander zoo.

Neighbours, she says, have yet to complain about the 12 kiddie pools in her backyard that she uses to keep the salamanders and there are no local bylaws prohibiting her from collecting and raising the animals.

However, Ontario’s Ministry of Natural Resources does not allow amphibians to be taken from or released into the wild.

“I’m aware of the laws, but my conscience says it’s worse to let them die, so I do everything in my power to make sure everything is as natural as possible,” she says. “One vehicle running through a pool once could kill an entire batch of eggs. That seems worse than me putting them in a safe area which is all natural.”

According to Forbes, the process of raising the salamanders and releasing them is time consuming — she spends between 25 and 35 hours on salamander care per week — and costly.

Feeding the salamanders slabs of frozen brine shrimp that Forbes thaws and sprinkles in the pools runs her about $35 a week.

“I really haven’t been calculating a total that I’ve spent because I almost don’t want to know,” she says, estimating that her salamander project has reached well beyond $500.

But she says the time and money is worth it if she can save a few lives.

“One night, salamanders laid eggs and the ATVs went through before I got there so most of the eggs were torn up,” she says. “It’s important to take the time to get them daily when they start laying eggs so they can be rescued.”

Her fascination with salamanders began in the summer of 2013, when her father, Dennis, saw a pile of eggs in the middle of a local road where water was collecting.

Not wanting the eggs to get crushed by ATV riders who rip up and down nearby trails, he and Carolyn collected them without knowing what kind of animals would hatch.

At first, they thought it might be frogs, but soon after, the eggs cracked, revealing baby salamanders.

That year they released about 25 of the amphibians, each a few inches long, into the wild.

This year their backyard salamander collection has grown, beginning with about 350 egg sacs, which could hatch up to 17,500 salamanders.

The chances of that many hatching and making it through infancy are unlikely says Toronto Zoo amphibian and reptile curator Bob Johnson.

He estimates their natural mortality rate to be as high as 90 per cent over the 60 to 90 day transformation from egg to aquatic larvae to “salamanderlet.”

Forbes says it’s unfortunate that most won’t make it to being released.

“There’s just not a high chance of them living because they die off and eat each other,” she says of her salamanders, which were recently targeted by raccoons. “I desperately try not to name them or I will get too attached to them.”

But, she says, there will always be one exception — Lucy, a “gentle,” l-shaped salamander that was born deformed.

“Some of the little frogs I have pop over to say hi to her,” Forbes says, giggling.

Her love of animals like Lucy isn’t new. Forbes says she collected frogs as a kid.

“My dad would take me to swamps and I would catch frogs during the day and let them go,” she says. “Then he would take me over to the bait shop and buy me a bag of frogs so I could release them. It was always a natural thing. I just loved frogs and now, I love salamanders.”

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